I spend my time at work doing things to automate tasks, script tedium, collect information and some outright application design. We're talking about things like capturing information from the SMBIOS on various hardware and dropping it in a database for our reporting guy to dig through, building shims for broken Microsoft security patches that don't work well with MBSA and HFNetChk, scripts to go through temp archives and find interesting bits and delete everything over N days old, and so forth, occasionally interspersed by writing applications real users make use of, but to do completely trivial tasks.

I dream of spending my time doing things that are interesting. I'd love to be working on writing applications to explore and tap the potential for sensors in mesh networks. I'd love to write some code that's been bouncing around my head for a generic web scraper in PHP. It'd really make my day to build out code for my bliki. I have a million other projects I'd love to work on, as well.

Alas, I work long hours in a Microsoft shop. We solve narrow problems and cares nothing for systems or software that aren't suited to running a hospital. We serve the purpose of the organization, and the rest can go to Hell.

It's a classic "corporate IT worker with desires to do something more" dilemma, but twisted up with the added facet that everyone I work with is a member of the Borg collective that is Microsoft. I don't even have folks at work I can share these ideas and feelings with, and when I do they get berated and ridiculed.

What's a guy to do?

This is a small piece of why I want to move to California, where technology happens. There are geeks there. It's why I think, also, you shouldn't center your social life around folks you work with, because your employer finds interesting in a person often won't mirror what value you'd find in them as a friend.

Maybe I just need some geek friends, period. Where do you find open-source loving, forward-looking geek friends in Houston?

restlessmind